Tag: Redwoods

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happy holidays

I hope that all of you who celebrate some form of wintery holiday at this time of year are enjoying that time with family and loved ones.

I have the very good fortune of playing host to a friend from England for the holidays.  She arrived the Wednesday before Christmas, and will leave the Wednesday after New Years.

We started with some average San Francisco touristy things, like the San Francisco Dungeons and the cable car ride from Fisherman’s Wharf into Union Square.  I introduced her to our family’s Christmas chaos, and then we went to Muir Woods where we slow walked in the woods with every other tourist in northern California.

Yesterday was a rest day, which is to say we went shopping.  And today, my visiting friend finally got to see the Winchester Mystery house in San Jose.  I say finally, because she has been trying to get there for 13 years, but something always got in the way.

Currently, we are comfortably ensconced in a hotel room in Santa Cruz as a starting point for our journey down to Monterey tomorrow.

It’s been fun, exhausting and pain inducing day.  It’s tough touristing like a teenager when you’re pushing fifty and have chronic pain issues!

Tomorrow should be more of the same because we’ll be visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Saturday we’re going whale watching.  By the time we get home, we should both be ready to sleep for 24 hours.

Whatever you and yours are up to, I hope it’s half as fun.

*Picture above is one I shot in the Muir Woods on Tuesday.

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stillness

There is a stillness in the woods.  It isn’t something you can find in the hustle-bustle of a city.  It is something unique to the woods.  Step off the paved road and onto a carpet of grass, fallen leaves, pine needles, step between the trees.  You don’t have to go far to feel it.  Just enough that you can’t see the road, can’t hear the cars.

The hush settles over you and that stillness sinks deep into you.  Here, you are connected to the earth beneath your feet, to the years stretching back into the ancient past and forward into the unknown future.

This is one of the places I am home.  All of the anxiety flushes away.  All the worries and needs and concerns drift off and I am at peace.

I took the picture above on my mini vacation earlier this month.  It’s the type of place I imagine Mason feeling quite at home.  I imagine I would live quite happily in some little cabin out there, surrounded by trees older than our country and that stillness.

Of course, only if I had a good internet connection!  I may love that stillness, but I was raised on modern conveniences and I love my internet.

It was something like this I had in mind as I settled Mason Jerah into his childhood home…a place where magic doesn’t seem so much of a stretch, where life teems and the very air seems to vibrate with a feeling of home.

It’s nice this morning, with another busy day stretched out ahead of me, to take a moment and close my eyes to try to recapture that peace, that stillness…before deadlines and emails and to-do lists fill up my attention.

Have a great Tuesday, Readers!